Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Margaret McAndrew teaches karma—a law only Buddhas fully grasp, yet essential to observe in practice. She opens by asking participants to examine their motivation: do you approach this path with genuine commitment to liberating all beings? She explains how virtuous, non-virtuous, and neutral actions produce results across past, present, and future lives; why observing karma paradoxically matters even when aiming to transcend it; and how to distinguish projecting karma (determining rebirth) from ripening karma (shaping daily life). She frames karma through four governing factors—definiteness, expansion, causation, and group karma—illustrated with striking stories: a clairvoyant spotting missing auras before a train crash; a plane-crash survivor sustained by merit. Daily practice includes checking actions, regretting harmful ones to halt their expansion, and rejoicing in virtuous ones to amplify their power. Assumes familiarity with Buddhist vocabulary and refuge teaching.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 DwP 1998 02 25.mp3
UUID: ecaf5e19-d846-4f7f-9a66-78f2bdc15263
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-02-25
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~6,371
One person, two people, because it so happens that, I was due to talk about karma tonight. So I’m sorry, for those of you who are, not doing it at Rinpoche’s talk. Sorry. It’s going to be terribly boring because you’ve just listened to it before. But anyway yes.
Okay. So you might get a chance to ask the questions, but there were too many people to to get a word in the other night for. Anyway, it never has to have it reinforced again and again, but I’m sorry about it coming so close on the other topic. But, anyway, I thought that I might as well just keep on going on in the same the same the the the proper order. So, anyway, before we start, I’ve just set our motivation for bodhicitta and just think that we can be doing actions with all different kinds of motivations, and there are virtuous, non virtuous and neutral motivations.
So if we’ve thought about coming to this session with some sort of worldly motivation or with some sort of rather meaningless kind of thought, then we should check and become aware of this now and correct it. So the most positive thought is seeking liberation, and not just for ourselves but thinking that since we’re aware of suffering in our own lives and aware that we’re caught up in the chain of suffering and cyclic existence and want to do something positive to end that and attain the everlasting peace of liberation, then it’s not enough just to want to gain this for ourselves because all sentient beings in Samsāra are in the same situation as ourselves and most of them are actually experiencing much worse situations than we are and furthermore they’re going up and down like we are so every single samsaric being, even the ones which are in the happy realms, are liable to fall back into the suffering states of the lower realms. And so it’s not enough to ignore their plight. It’s the most worthwhile thing that we can do to make our objective mainly to gain the stages of the path so as to become able to help others to follow it and achieve liberation and enlightenment.
So we set our minds on that thought with a sort of love and compassion for others. So talking about karma, it’s it’s a very complex topic. It’s not easy to understand. It’s said that only Buddhas fully understand karma. This is really talking about totally seeing karma.
Buddhas don’t have to rely on conceptual thinking to understand any topic at all. They understand things immediately, instantly, experientially. And Buddhas can understand where every single being’s results come from, no matter how many hundreds of lives they come from, and that is explained by stories in the scriptures. One story that everybody hears over and over and over again is the, story of the, the person who wanted to become a monk but who didn’t seem to have any good karma at all, any good qualities. He was quite stupid and didn’t seem to have any potential.
The other monks around Buddha, even though they were very sympathetic, said, oh, know, it’s not much use you’re taking up a monk’s life. But Buddha checked further back with his clairvoyant powers, was able to check further back and see that this man had once been a fly which happened to land on a little pat of dried cow dung that got floated by flood water around a stupa. As a result of the power of the stupa, he had that little bit of seed of good karma in him that was possible to be ripened by bringing out the right training. So he became a monk and was very successful in his practice. Whether you take that literally or not doesn’t really matter.
The point is that it makes a point and the point is that we have so many karmas that we can’t see and that we really, if we’re ordinary people or even if we only have limited clairvoyant powers, we can’t really be certain of seeing every bit of karmic cause and result. And so therefore it’s one of these things that, unfortunately, we can’t really check out very thoroughly in this life at present, and we have to take a lot of it on faith and trust, at least for the present. It doesn’t mean that we can’t check it out to some extent, but obviously we’re not going to be able to check it out very fully. We’re only going to be able to perhaps get a bit of an indication here and there. Even if we go to clairvoyance, with limited clairvoyant powers who can read back for several past lifetimes, they might be able to see certain causes and effects coming into effect and ripening in this lifetime, but they are not going to be able to explain everything to us and they might still see things that seem to be contradictory.
For instance, a person might have lived a good life for several past lifetimes, a clairvoyant might tell them of this and they might still have to experience ripening results of some kind of quite severe bad karma and they might wonder if they’ve been so good for the last three or four lives why do they have to experience this. The reason is that the result goes back before that time. The cause was created perhaps a hundred lifetimes ago and this is further back than these clairvoyant people are capable of seeing. Basically as we develop our meditation powers and develop more and more clairvoyance, we’ll be able to see more and more about our own lives and also about the lives of others. But at the present, we can only study the scriptural explanation and see how it seems to fit the pattern.
It is very interesting actually to see how it does explain things, make sense of things that wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Of course, it has to be understood in the context of past and future lives. If we’re looking at karma trying to understand karma, if we don’t accept past and future lives, it’s not going to make sense because in the course of this lifetime we’re going to see very, very few karmic results that we can point to. In actual fact, even those things that seem to be karmic results of actions we have done in this life may really not be so. It may be that good results are really ripening from previous past karmas and not from the good actions we’ve done.
Similarly, if we do a bad action and experience some sort of bad result right away, lot of people tend to say, Oh, I had instant karma from that! But it’s probably not instant karma, it’s probably some kind of ripening result from some other bad karma in the past and you’ve probably still got the result of that bad karma of this lifetime that you need to work on to purify. The good thing about bad karma is that if we haven’t experienced experienced the result yet then it’s possible to do a lot to purify it and we’ll be talking about that. So are there any specific questions before I go on into the topic? Well, I’m not sure.
I think, really, we don’t really understand what time is. Yes. But still, the Buddhist scriptures do accept the time is chronological for practical purposes. Yes. It is logical to talk about past and future lives as it’s logical to talk about yesterday and tomorrow.
So it’s it’s only a relative truth, and you might be thinking of the fact that they it’s said that the three times are all one to the the enlightened beings, to those who who have gone beyond being tied to conceptuality and who realize the Absolute Truth completely. In the context of the Absolute Truth, a lot of things we accept literally on the conventional level can’t be accepted literally at the absolute level. For instance, you often hear it say that there is no such thing as good and bad karma because these are all just relative concepts and absolutely there is no such thing as good and bad. Well, that’s true enough when you get to the absolute level but we’re dealing with the relative level here and we can’t just ignore the relative level. The relative level is very, very important and we have to deal with it on its own terms according to its own laws and a very important law of the relative level is the law of karma and it’s the most important law that we have to understand because it’s the one that’s going to help us to actually get beyond that.
We just sort of have to it doesn’t really matter. We can try to understand it but the main thing is to realize that it is important to work according to karma. In fact, I think most of us would agree in general that it is necessary to have some basic ethics and to follow certain rules and that these things really are for the good of society and they actually bring good results in the present as well as in future lives from the point of view that if we live our lives according to some basic rules of ethics, then society is going to be better and our relationship with others will be better. Any more questions? Yes.
Well, it’s not cause and effect happening there. Of course, by being kind to these people, you’re creating We divide these things into two kinds of cause. There’s what’s called cause, the main cause, which is karma in the context we’re talking about, and there’s condition. Condition. By being kind to your colleagues, you are actually creating a condition for them to be nice to you in return.
Of course, things are very important. It’s really very closely connected, but the actual fact that they are being pleasant to you in return also has something to do with your karma. You must have created that sort of karma, and it would have been something you’d created before, probably in previous lifetimes. But the fact that you’re creating conditions allows this karma to manifest and you’re also of course creating good karma for the future. So either earlier in this lifetime or in some previous lifetimes you must have created sort of good karma that you’re experiencing when people are being pleasant to you now.
And you do actually find instances of some people who are not who who are good people but still get a lot of bad results. Somehow everything seems to go wrong for them and they don’t seem to get the results that another person has. Whereas some other people have something about them so that other people are always nice to them, even if they might not do terribly much for other people. In fact, some people, even be quite selfish, they have some sort of charm about them that makes other people like them and be pleasant to them. Whereas other people perhaps go around being very good to other people, but because they somehow lack this particular sort of appeal, they don’t get that sort of result.
This is very much connected with karma. And so it’s very subtle. So what you say holds true in general, but it doesn’t hold true a hundred percent of the time because sometime I mean, about the fact that if you’re nice to other people, they’ll be nice to you. It’s generally true. We know it’s our general experience, but sir, you can find exceptions to that rule, which shows that it isn’t a hundred percent accurate.
There’s some accurate there’s some other factors working in there, and that other factor is karma. Anyway, karma can be divided up in different ways. One way of looking at it is that there are two main kinds of karma, and this is looking at it from the point of view of creating the course and receiving the result. We can experience two different kinds of results, so the karma is labeled according to the result it brings. One kind of karma is projecting karma and that means a karma which brings about a particular kind of rebirth.
The projecting karma is generally the stronger ones that we create and there are various different factors that can make a karma strong enough to bring about a rebirth and that includes such things as being created with a very, very strong mental attitude whether it’s virtuous or non virtuous. For instance, an example of a very strong non virtuous attitude would be very strong hatred and anger. If somebody was to kill with that sort of attitude, then they would be creating a very strong negative action and creating it with a very strong motivation. If they motivation. Then if they also repeat the action many times, that’s another factor that can make it stronger.
There are a number of those factors which have the effect of strengthening the karma. A result of this, certain karmas tend to ripen more readily than others these bring about a rebirth. At the time of death, actually before the death, at a certain stage during the dying process, I won’t go into the details about it this week, but at some future talk there will be time to go into the details of the death process, There is a ripening of the karma for the rebirth that’s to come about and at that stage the mechanism starts to work to bring about the next rebirth, whatever it may be. Even in one day we can create quite a number of these projecting karmas or we can create any number of karmas and quite a lot of them are going to be karmas that are capable of bringing about a rebirth. In the course of a day we lay down plenty of causes for rebirth so we don’t ever have to worry about running out of karma to be reborn.
That’s one thing that isn’t going to happen. The karmas that don’t bring about a rebirth but ripen during the course of a life are called ripening karma because they bring about varied results during the course of a lifetime so it’s quite possible to experience different kinds of karma during the course of your lifetime it’s not necessary that good karma at birth is going to mean good karma all the way along, particularly in the human realm as we know we constantly experience ups and downs because we’re experiencing all kinds of different karma. You can also see examples of beings who have one kind of projecting karma and what seems to be a pretty consistent kind of ripening karma of the opposite kind. So, for example, you can say that a pet dog would have bad projecting karma to be born in the animal realm but then good ripening karma because they are looked after and well fed and cared for and generally have a good life. This kind of example can be in an opposite way.
If you see, for instance, a human being who is born in a very miserable and wretched situation and endures bad conditions and suffering throughout the course of their life. For instance, you know, the street people in India. So you can’t really say what their life is like, but it looks pretty wretched on the whole. Another way of looking at it, which is very relevant for us, is to see that there are three kinds of karma and we’re particularly concerned with two of them. So, these three kinds are virtuous, non virtuous, and neutral karma.
So, this is really the most important distinction for us to be able to make is the distinction between virtuous and non virtuous. We don’t have to worry about neutral so much. So an example of neutral karma would be the kind of karma that we create in deep sleep when we roll over automatically as a result of some sort of reflex stimulus that’s happening at a very low subconscious level of mentality in our brain. This creates more neutral karma, so we’re creating the karma to roll over in our sleep and our next life, or something similar like that. We don’t have to worry about that.
That’s not going to affect us very much, but we’re very much affected by our virtuous and non virtuous karma, and this has got a lot to do with our waking state of mind. So, in the context of the three scopes, we are talking here about lower scope practice. I introduced the idea of the three scopes last week, if I remember. I was talking about the motivations with which we practice. There are three levels of motivation and each one builds on the other.
The practices of the lower scope are essential all the way through, but the person who is purely operating on the lower scope without having thought of medium or higher scope is a person who’s primarily concerned with receiving a fortunate rebirth, with escaping the lower realms in their future lives. That has to be taken in the context that eventually that person will want to achieve liberation. But at the present they’re mainly focusing just on wanting to escape the lower realms. At this stage they haven’t really built up a very strong motivation for getting out of saṃsāra, whereas the person who’s built up a very strong motivation for getting out of Samsāra has achieved the realization of renunciation, which means the renunciation of Samsaric life, and they are very focused on achieving liberation. And the person of that’s the medium scope and the person of the highest scope.
Does anybody here remember what the highest scope motivation is? Uh-huh. Right. Good. Right.
So that’s the higher scope. It’s not just wanting liberation for yourself but wanting to help while others attain liberation and that involves achieving enlightenment which is actually a higher state than just liberation. So those are the three scopes anyway in brief, very brief. And of course there’s an awful lot that could be said about those three scopes. At the present, we’re looking at the scope practice and we talked about at the lower scope practice and we looked at refuge, which is the entry to the path.
We saw that refuge involves having a fear of the lower realms and trust in the Three Jewels of refuge, Buddhadharma and Sangha, and wanting to follow their guidance. So having taken refuge, then we look at what their guidance entails, in other words, what Buddha’s teachings tell us, and we find that the first step we have to take is observing karma. This is the most basic and fundamental practice, so having a little bit of an understanding of karma and putting that basic understanding of karma into operation is the first step and the fundamental step to all other practices. Even if we’re not doing any other practice, if we’re practicing observance of karma according to Buddhist teachings, we’re practicing Buddhists and we’re doing something very worthwhile with our lives. So this is a very important practice.
So, also, we might think we’re trying to get beyond karma. So why should we observe it? Has anybody had that thought? No? Okay.
Sometimes you do get that question. People sometimes come up with that, qualm or, sort of doubt about this topic. So it makes sense to everybody. So anyway, we can’t just go beyond karma. We are aiming to get beyond karma but in the meantime we have to work with karma.
So we have to work at avoiding the kind of karma that’s going to hold us back and drag us down and work on building up the kind of karma that’s going to help us. This word karma might be confusing. It can be helpful to look at it as a form of energy. And it’s the kind of energy which, can either be going the wrong way and dragging us back, or it can be getting behind us and pushing us forward in the way we want to go. So it’s a very obvious step to take to work on eliminating the kind of energy that’s dragging us back and getting into the stream of the energy that’s going to help us go forwards.
And so the an actual actual literal translation of the word karma simply means action. And this refers to actions of our body, speech, and mind which bring about a result. The kind of result we’re talking about, as I already mentioned, is results that we experience not immediately as a result of action. For instance, if you put your hand in the fire, you’ll burn your finger. That’s not karma.
It is a kind of karma, but not as it seems. You know, if you drink a glass of water, your thirst gets relieved. That is cause and result, but it’s not on the karmic level. Of course, all these things are involved with karma, karma that goes way back. But in general terms we say, for instance, if you go out to work and get a job then you’re going to earn money and that’s cause and result.
But we’re not talking about cause and result on that level, we’re talking about on a different level. We’re talking about how every action we do, every volitional action we do, creates an impression on our consciousness, on our mind stream. As I mentioned before, the mind isn’t form. It’s not the brain, it’s the formless part of our being and it’s capable of registering impressions in the form of this energy. That energy is just an imprint but when it ripens it brings about a result.
It can be retained on the mind stream for any given amount of time until it is ready to bring about a result. When it does bring about that result then that is calmer. The result is very connected with the action and the motivation with which the action was created. The motivation or the intention is the most important factor here. So, we can’t get out of this pattern just by stopping creating karma and just wearing our karma up.
There are some people, the Jains, think that this is possible. Their practice is largely around the idea that by avoiding creating karma and by austerity, it’s possible to wear out karma. But this isn’t in accordance with the the Buddhist view. We we can work with karma, but we can’t just wear it out. But we can actually eliminate these imprints eventually.
There is a way that these imprints can eventually be eliminated. This has to be done through deep meditation, through very advanced meditational practice. This comes really into the middle scope. If we’re looking at actually totally eliminating the seed of karma, then we have to be looking at achieving these advanced kinds of meditation and that comes under the middle scope practice. It’s beyond the scope of the lower scope practitioner but it’s important to know that this is what we’re aiming for further along the path.
In the meantime, what we’re trying to do is build up the good energy which will support us in our practice. It has several results. It’s going to, first of all, help us to avoid the lower realms and then by dedicating that merit, that good karma on the path to enlightenment, it becomes the merit that supports our practice and gives energy to our practice of meditation so that we can actually achieve the various different stages of the path. So the intention is what mainly, makes the difference between good karma and bad karma. So, good karma is created with a virtuous intention, such as wanting to help others, such as wanting to attain liberation and enlightenment.
And bad karma is created with one of the deluded states of mind. So does anybody remember what the delusions are or the, the nonvirtuous mental states? There’s three main ones perhaps that somebody might remember. That’s right. Yes.
So they can be subdivided up into a lot of other kind of branches, but the the main three that we can keep in mind when we’re looking at this topic of karma is the the three of desire or greed or clinging attachment and of aversion, hatred, anger and and ignorance. In particular, we’re thinking about the ignorance here that doesn’t understand karma. There’s many different kinds of ignorance. For instance, if we’re ignorant about the theory of relativity that isn’t going to make much difference to our Dharma practice fortunately and if we are ignorant about emptiness, that would perhaps a problem when we come to meditate on emptiness, it’s not going to be something that’s going to be a terrible big problem for our practice of karma. But if we have ignorance about karma, about past and future lives, if we hold that there’s no such thing as karma or if we hold wrong views according to what is a good action and what is a wrong action then this is going to disturb our practice so it’s very important to take the trouble to find out what is a right action, what is a wrong action, and how to observe karma effectively.
So any is this clear? Any questions? So, also good karma is created with virtuous mind. But, while we’re in saṃsāra, we’re going to be under the influence of certain kinds of ignorance. So all all karma, all saṃsāra karma is created under a certain level of delusion, but it can be quite a subtle level of delusion.
So if we’re creating virtuous karma, that’s actually very positive and it’s taking us in a direction which is taking us further away from being under the control of delusion so we don’t have to worry too much about that subtle level of ignorance at this stage. But we do have to worry very much about that gross level of ignorance which can’t discriminate between right and wrong. So, there is, also another kind of karma, which is non samsaric karma. The Tibetans have a word for it called tenle which translates literally as cloud of actions. This is the virtuous actions of the beings who have gone beyond saṃsāra, Buddhas and higher bodhisattvas.
They create tremendously powerful actions, but it’s not karma in the sense that it doesn’t bring about samsaric cause and result. It brings about a particular kind of cause which enables them to work powerfully for sentient beings. But this isn’t samsaric karma, and so we have to distinguish between that and samsaric karma which is the kind of karma that we’re creating all the time and our karma which we create includes both virtuous and non virtuous karmas and as I mentioned before neutral karma which we don’t need to worry about. So we do need to worry very much about virtuous and non virtuous karmas and we have to look at how we’re going to reduce the non virtuous and build up the virtuous. So there are four factors Four factors influencing karma.
Four factors which we need to understand in order to have some idea of how karma works. One of these, the first one, is that karma is definite. That means that if we create a non virtuous action then the result of that will be a suffering result. There’s no way that a non virtuous action can bring a good result. And so this proves that karma has nothing to do with the sort of immediate result of the action because, for instance, we might steal something and enjoy the benefits of of that thing that we’ve stolen.
For instance, if we steal a car, we might go for a joyride and have a lot of fun. So that’s not a karmic result. By stealing that car we’ve also created an imprint on our consciousness which is going to, in some future life, result in us having our lovely new car stolen or something like that. So we’re going to have experience some sort of suffering result. And if we do get our car stolen, it’s because maybe we stole somebody’s chariot.
Maybe they didn’t have cars then. Anyway, we did something, you know, stole a horse or something. So we’re experiencing some sort of appropriate result. So it means definitely we’re going to have to experience some sort of result that’s a suffering result as a result of that non virtuous karma. And in the same way, if we do a good action, for instance, if we see somebody who’s hungry and and we give them our money and then we have to go without lunch ourselves because we’ve given them our lunch money, then that might be a little bit of suffering but it’s not karma because we’ve actually created a very virtuous action The fact that we went through a little bit of hardship in order to do it ourselves means that it’s all the more virtuous.
We’re going to receive a very strong virtuous result from that in some sort of future life. And there’s no way that a wrong action, a non virtuous action, can bring a result of happiness, and there’s no way that a good action can bring a result of suffering in the karmic sense. So the second factor is that karma is expanding. Now this is always the hardest one to understand. And this is that unless we interfere with that karma in some way, then the result it brings is going to keep on growing and growing day by day.
So for instance, if we kill an insect with anger, we slap a mosquito, really hitting that mosquito and wanting to hurt it and kill it, then that’s a non virtuous action. But because it’s an insect, it’s perhaps not such a big action as it would be if we were to kill a human being. Day by day if we don’t purify that action it just keeps on expanding and after a certain number of days, I forget how many, but maybe about twenty three or something like that, not so many, it becomes as big as if you’d killed a human being through this expanding factor. So, this is something that we need to be aware of because being skillful in karma means, making use of this factor of expanding because it works for both good and bad karma. What we want to do is make sure we stop the expanding of our bad karma.
The way to stop it is by regretting it. It’s very important that at the end of each day we should check through what we’ve done during the day and feel regret for the bad karmas that we’ve done. I’ll be talking more about purifying later on, but in particular regret is very very important because it stops this expanding factor. On the other hand, it works for good karma too. So if we regret our good karmas, then we stop them expanding.
So we have to avoid feeling regret for good karmas. For instance, if we’ve perhaps given away more money than we could really afford to a good cause, then later on we might be having to experience some sort of hardship. We should try to control ourselves from feeling regret that we gave away all that money because at this stage it’s done. We can’t get the money back, so it’s important that we should just feel glad that we’ve done it and not regret it. In the same way, we shouldn’t make other people regret their good actions.
If somebody is about to give away what you think is too much money, it’s alright to say to them, Look, it’s better to just give what you can afford. That’s fine. But if you learn that they’ve already done it and it’s too late to stop them, then you should just say, oh, what a great thing to do. Because if you were to say to them, well, look, that was stupid of you. You shouldn’t have given away more than you can afford, then they might regret it.
And in that way, you’re going to cut off a lot of their results of their good action. I might just mention here at this point too that rejoicing is something that increases the power of our karma, whether it’s in a good action or a bad action. So we have to avoid rejoicing in bad action then we should practice rejoicing for our good actions. This is something we do every day at the same time as we check our bad karmas and purify our bad karmas. We also increase the power of our good ones through rejoicing and this is a very beneficial practice.
So then the third factor is that there can be no result without having created a cause and so nothing happens randomly. And If we’re walking through the forest and a branch falls on our head, actually the Theravadins seem to feel that these kinds of things can be random results, but according to the Mahāyāna teachings, even something like this something as a result of an inanimate object experiencing some sort of action or something, this can be This is definitely a karmic result according to the Mahāyāna teachings. Even if it’s that’s done to us by an inanimate object, it’s not random. It’s a result of our karma. There was a reason why we went under that particular tree at that particular time.
And another factor of this is that sometimes we create karma as a group. Can be that because we create karma as a group, come together and experience the results at the same time. When people experience a group result, is a sign of their having been together at the creation of the karmic cause. If somebody in that particular group didn’t go along with the rest of the group then they’re not going to experience the result. I always think a really good example of this is a story which I heard about many years ago.
Apparently somebody said it’s been televised or made into a movie or something since then, I didn’t see that. But I remember reading about it in the press at the time. It’s quite a remarkable story. There was a girl who was a schoolgirl in Brazil was flying home to her father’s ranch for Christmas, and she had a Christmas cake on her lap that she was going to take home with her. And she was in a small plane which crashed and everybody else in the plane got killed and this girl was practically totally unhurt.
She survived the plane crash but she was lost in the middle of the jungle. Fortunately, was fairly jungle wise and she just sat out walking and ate the cake as she went along. Finally, she ran out of cake, at the time she ran out of cake, she’d reached a river. So she built herself a raft and floated down the river, and she was starving. But she eventually reached a settlement and was rescued.
And I think that’s just the most amazing story. I mean, you would think that everything was against her. Was no way she could have survived, but somehow she survived all that. On the other hand, you hear some other stories. One story to you hear a number of times is of clairvoyant people who suddenly realize that they’re about to get into a lift or something and they suddenly realize that all the other people in the lift, the least clairvoyant people are used to seeing auras and they suddenly realize that they’re getting into the lift with a whole lot of people who have no aura and so they jump out in astonishment and then the lift crashes to the ground and everybody gets killed.
I read an interview recently with Swami Saraswati, and she apparently has this kind of clairvoyant power and had it from childhood. And she was about to get onto a train with her family and she noticed that a lot of the people on the train were lacking auras. She was absolutely terrified and she insisted on turning back and of course her family were quite upset and angry with her. But she made such a fuss that they had to give in and so they went on a different train. Later on they heard that this train had been involved in a terrible accident and there had been quite a lot of people killed.
Particularly the carriage that they were about to get into was right in the middle of the crash and was had a particularly high number of people killed. And so, of course, her family then realized that she’d saved their life by by doing by insisting on not getting in. But it seems like I don’t know the connection between auras and life force, but it seems like in some of these people who get killed although it seems like something that happened by accident and that it couldn’t have been predicted and that these people were still well and truly alive up to the time of the accident, still somehow their life force, their karma had already finished and there was no aura, which I think is very interesting. I don’t know how it works, but it seems to say that for these people, was certainly no accident and that there was it was no accident that they were all brought together. So so these there’s little stories like this that sort of back up the teachings on karma.
Yes. Yes. Yes. So there is a life force that we have and everybody have has a